Please help me identify schools good for a robust political debate, such as Claremont McKenna College. Looking for policy wonk technocrat types, NOT political activists (eg. avoid schools with students focused on protesting the college president or college policies). Diversity of politics is ideal, but prefer left-leaning to right-leaning colleges. Avoid overly politically correct colleges - looking for smart students who speak their mind.
Possible Majors: Political Science/Economics/Public Policy/International Relations
Projected New SAT = 1450
IB Diploma with challenging schedule (eg. Further Math)
School doesn’t use US grading system or calculate GPA
U.S. citizen URM
EFC = $22,000 at well funded colleges.
Interested in schools that meet 100% of financial need. Prefer need-blind admission schools. Florida resident but live abroad.
Match schools
Hamilton
Vassar
Macalester
Reach schools
Claremont McKenna
Pomona
Swarthmore
Williams
Safety (2-3 FL state colleges)
University of Florida?
New College of Florida?
Would appreciate thoughts on the above schools and additional suggestions.
Colleges with an available D.C. semester (i.e., policy wonks) as well as high admissions standards (i.e., smart students) would generally offer you at least the foundation of an environment that would suit your expressed interests.
Other “match” possibilities that are a little less selective than Hamilton and Vassar include:
Kenyon, URichmond, Holy Cross, Franklin & Marshall, Lafayette, Union, Occidental.
These schools also claim to cover 100% of demonstrated need.
Williams, Hamilton and CMC, all of which you’ve included, seem to house some of the country’s most scholarly economics faculty: “Economics Departments at Liberal Arts Colleges,” IDEAS.
Some colleges support a public policy, “think tank” organization on campus (their descriptive names vary). This could be another attribute worth considering as you continue your research.
At many of the colleges mentioned in the above posts, there will be no “robust political debate” but instead sustained orthodox political monologue. I am not at all a Trump supporter but try supporting Trump at Vassar and see what happens.
These days, political “debate”, on college campuses and otherwise, seems to consist mostly of insults and shouting matches, regardless of the issues or candidates. If you are looking for a reasoned discussion on some political issue, expect to be disappointed.
Actually, this is a myth about CMC. My son is in his third year there, and he says Trump supporters keep their beliefs to themselves. Most students support HRC.
Thanks everyone for the quick responses. A few thoughts on some of the posts above:
We looked into American, Georgetown, George Washington, but the net price calculators indicate these will be much more costly than the others on my list.
We also looked into Kenyon, but had a few concerns. One liberal student told us the political correctness on campus is stiffing. She was referring to a general fear of offending each other, rather than the conservative’s definition of political correctness as a purely liberal phenomenon. We also had a feeling that Kenyon was disproportionately artsy and relatively weak in hard sciences. Nothing against artsy students, but we suspect that a better mix of hard science types would add a degree of intellectual rigor to a campus.
While I would be concerned about going 4 years without meeting a Romney or McCain supporter, I really haven’t found Trump supporters to be equally interesting (was that politically incorrect?). The politics of Trump supporters are no mystery to us; I grew up and continue to vacation in Trump country. They tend to produce more heat than light in my experience. Trump is unique in that he really hasn’t really added thought-out policy proposals to the American political debate. Romney and McCain, by contrast, had thoughtful policy proposals and coherent political philosophies worthy of debate, and probably more in line with debates America can expect in the future.
As this relates to responses above, my impression is that CMC consists of technocratic Democrats and #NeverTrump Republicans - thus your son’s impression that most CMC students support HRC. That’s enough diversity for me. I don’t have any idea about political diversity at Vassar (which was mentioned) or any of the other colleges on my list.
A number of other suggestions were made in this thread which I will look into in the coming days.
Denison might be one to look at, the President, Adam Weinberg, has written on Huff Post about the importance of engaging with difference, and there seems to be a real blend of types of students, from conservative to left. Not a school driven by PC, single-perspective conversations.
This understanding should be more widely appreciated. Quantitatively oriented academic offerings and students can inform and add rigor to the social sciences in particular.
For a statistical approach for your further research, look first to colleges at which the SAT testing for entering students shows rough balance across Critical Reading, Math and Writing scores.